Southwest Regional Partnership - Terrestrial Sequestration: La Manga Canyon, San Juan Basin, New Mexico. Remote sensing was used to measure the temporal effect of energy development and delineate the change of linear disturbances (roads and pipelines) and wellpads over the 50 year record.

Southwest Regional Partnership - Terrestrial Sequestration: Improving Estimates of Rangeland Carbon Sequestration Potential

La Manga Canyon is a small watershed in the San Juan Basin that has historically been developed for natural gas and recently for coal bed methane. Since gas production began in the 1940’s, an extensive network of dirt roads have transected the watershed, providing access to well sites.

Temperatures are increasing globally, but the magnitude and trajectory of localized changes in precipitation are uncertain. This uncertainty in climate results is uncertainty in predictions of future ecosystem dynamics. We used 18 years of ecosystem responses that included a series of both dry and wet years to predict future dynamics of a heterogeneous landscape under directional changes in climate.

Studies of human-dominated ecosystems have traditionally externalized human agents and their behaviors. In spite of century-long studies of vegetation change, the specific role of human decisions and their feedbacks with land condition are unknown. This is partly because variation in socio-economic patterns occurs at broad scales and ecological factors are usually measured at finer scales, complicating efforts to relate these data types.

Assessing Resilience of Western Rangelands to Transportation-Related Land-Use Change

Grazing effects on woody plant recruitment across space and time

Free-ranging livestock are classically controlled by herders. Holding, moving, or gathering free-ranging cattle requires flexible husbandry practices for efficient and effective low-stress animal management.

Predicting animal distribution is essential for predicting and managing the effects of large herbivores on landscape attributes. Explicit site specific models can be used as predictive tools. Predictive models can be built from empirical mechanisms that represent animal responses to recognized drivers of animal distributions in the landscape.

This study was designed to test if grazing behaviors differ between desert adapted Mexican criollo cattle and temperate British beef breeds, and to learn how each breed interacts with environments common to the southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico.

Directional Virtual Fencing is a patented method to autonomously control an animal's location and its direction of movement by applying bilateral cues that capitalize on innate behavioral responses.

Virtual fencing refers to a methodology for controlling free-ranging animals that does not require ground based fencing materials to restrict animal movement. Virtual fencing combines electronics with animal behavior to accomplish low-stress animal control.

Fluorometry is an optically based technique that has only recently been shown to be useful in range animal ecology research for identifying pre- as well as post-digested plant material. This poster traces the evolution of this methodology as a tool to determine botanical composition.

Project objective is to develop standardized long-term monitoring protocols for East Africa with a foundation in local knowledge that reflect changes in land's capacity to support multiple ecosystem services including livestock production and wildlife conservation...

Land use plans (based on land potential) can be used together with early warning systems to help individuals, communities, and nations minimize drought impacts by helping to focus attention on the least resilient areas before the drought begins.

Nearly 150 1m² quadrats were established for long-term monitoring of vegetation dynamics on the Jornada Experimental Range in south central New Mexico in the early 1900s. Today, approximately 120 of those sites are revisited on a five year sampling rotation.

There are insufficient resources to remediate or restore all desertified lands and there is usually insufficient time to monitor project success or failure. In response, we have developed simple assessment protocols that can be used to prioritize projects.

Land use throughout history has changed to suit the needs of the people, but just as the needs of the people have changed so should the methods employed to cultivate the land.

Interpretation of assessment and monitoring data requires land classification systems representing spatial variation in ecological potential (ecological sites) coupled to state-and-transition models (STMs) that describe temporal variation in ecological resilience.

Laser devices have been recently developed for use in vegetation monitoring. For this project we evaluated a commercially available, moderately-priced monopod-based laser device. This model was designed to collect point intercept and line intercept data and adapted for use in either the up or down position.

Our service to rangelands is restoration - because of degraded conditions, without restoration of ecological functions the arrays of goods and services that can be provided are severely limited. In most cases, restoration cannot be a passive process.

Why don’t we prioritize ecological research (and restoration) based on societal outcomes? A (partial) strategy for prioritizing ecological restoration and related research.

The National Resources Inventory (NRI) is a statistical survey of land use and natural resources conditions and trends on US non-federal lands conducted by the National Resources Conservation Service. The NRI provides one part of the scientific framework for the Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP), an interagency effort to quantify natural resource benefits delivered through conservation actions on private land. Data collected through this effort are relevant to an increasingly broad range of ecosystem services.

Rangeland monitoring with an UAS allows for mapping individual plants, patches, gaps, and patterns at very high resolution; it bridges the gap between ground measures and aerial photos/satellite imagery; and can be deployed quickly and repeatedly to assess rangeland health and ecosystem change.

Objectives of this research are to determine optimal texture features and optimal image analysis scale, to assess correlations between texture features as function of segmentation scale for mapping of broad rangeland vegetation structure groups in arid rangelands using sub-decimeter aerial photography.

Texture improved classification accuracies in related study; but, texture in object-based image analysis (OBIA) is time consuming to calculate; does intensity, hue, and saturation (IHS) give similar/better results than texture?; IHS was used successfully with very high resolution imagery in OBIA.

Most land management agencies have enormous amounts of rangeland to monitor and manage. All government agencies are expected to monitor vegetation structure and manage the public lands under their control and preserve these lands in a healthy condition.

Comparative phylogeographic analyses between plants and endophytes can illuminate understanding of endophyte influences on vegetation dynamics. Sampling strategies that account for variation in soil, climate, and vegetative communities associated with sampled host plants increase the power and applicability of such studies.

Rangeland health experts have shown that the UAV images allow, for the first time, identification of vegetation and land surface patterns and patches, gap sizes, bare soil percentages, and vegetation type over large areas.

UAVs are feasible and effective for rangeland mapping and monitoring. Their advantages outweigh challenges with the potential for spatial pattern analysis and high resolution vegetation mapping.

Approaches for mapping and monitoring arid rangelands with object-based image analysis and hyperspatial imagery.

Producers and land managers need information about soil and ecosystem change in order to plan for long-term productivity, conduct monitoring and assessments and predict management effects on soil function. Data collection procedures have been developed by NRCS and the Agricultural Research Service Jornada Experimental Range in cooperation with National Park Service, Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.

Why soil aggregate stability? Soil surface characteristics control capture and retention of water and nutrients. Soil aggregate stability is related to soil erodibility and infiltration capacity, both of which are: highly variable in space and time, and difficult to measure.

Accurate predictions of ecological soundness will require data from many studies. At present, the most limiting factor is the inability to detect and monitor endophytes in complex, variable environments.

The process of amplifying rDNA from diverse microbial populations with universal primers is prone to biases that inaccurately represent population diversity. We have used a variety of fungal- and bacterial-specific primers to amplify endophyte sequences from Atriplex species.

Identification of plant-microbe relationships that enhance restoration of degraded arid grasslands

The diversity of endophyte communities mandates “systems biology” approach. We are examining endophyte communities in fourwing saltbush. This requires a multifaced process (chemistry, genetics, microbiology, plant biology, phyllogenetics, and ecology). We expect transformational discoveries.

Modelling and prediction of future climate-affected snow cover, the decline of glaciers, and of changed runoff regimes using SRM provide essential information for hydropower production, flood control, winter sport resorts, water allocation, and water management.